High-performance applications to elevate the equine sport

Recently, I spoke with Tyson Hartshorn. We talked about the highs and lows of Innate.ly, his strategy around raising funds, and the XI ecosystem. This is the fifth episode in the bi-weekly series titled “The People Behind Innovation”. The series is available under Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify streaming services, or on Anchor with no account needed to stream. Please contact my email, owen@exponentialimpact.com, if you have any comments or founder stories.

Tyson Hartshorn began his career in baseball, playing for 8 years. Following this stint, he studied computer and electrical engineering, going on to become a software engineer. He is now the founder and CEO of Innate.ly, working to provide cloud-based enterprise solutions to the animal health industry. Tyson has been involved at Exponential Impact as both a mentor and program participant.

Who was your first client?

It’s a crazy story, but my first ever client was Pfizer. They have an animal health side of their company called Zoetis. I didn’t have much technology at the time, but they were really fascinated and had initiatives that my technology helped enable. Still to this day I think we have something like 14 Fortune 500 or larger clients, and we’re still a small company.

Traditionally our customers have either been large food producers mostly in the protein space, large pharmaceutical companies in the animal health space, or veterinarians. Now, by the nature of working with those three groups all the time, we touch farmers, ranchers, distributors, and retailers, but predominantly who we sell to are one of those 3 stakeholder types.

How did you navigate funding?

I knew I needed something to get started. I was still a young man. I didn’t have enough to personally invest to get me there, so I knew it was going to take some funding.

It was just the kind of technology where I wasn’t going to be able to bootstrap any kind of MVP by myself, so I raised a little money. I raised as little as I thought it would take.

Then I went out and started to develop the market. A lot of things didn’t work like I expected them to and some things did. As we continue to work on that market, you just open up new introductions, new networks, and new opportunities. We’ve kind of just found our way through that and figured out how to make it work. All this time later, we kind of have bootstrapped.

We’ve never gone after any kind of institutional funding. We’re 100% Angel funded at this point. We’re also a profitable company. While I did need early money to get going, ever since we we have gotten by with as little outside investment as possible, and I think it’s one of the absolute keys to our survival

How do you decide between positioning your business towards enterprise clients versus smaller clients?

I don’t know that there’s a defined answer.

I think every entrepreneur has to look at the market in front of them and weigh a number of factors. Big companies, in my experience, can be very slow to make decisions. They are very bureaucratic.

You can have a sales cycle — anywhere from a year to two years — and that’s quite normal because they make decisions as very large groups and generally on budget cycles. If you can survive that, the pros of the large companies is they’re generally well funded. Giving you a quarter or half million to deliver them a proof of concept or some initial product is not a big deal to them, as long as you can survive that sales cycle and as long as you understand that because $250k-$500k is nothing to them, it’s also nothing when it comes to trimming budgets and they will cut that kind of stuff in a heartbeat.

So you just have to know that risk going in. The smaller companies make decisions much quicker. You might have one or two decision makers there. Budget is going to be a lot tighter, so price is going to matter to them. They’re not going to want to take as big of a risk with the money they’re giving you. You generally have to have a much more compelling and finished product or concept when you come to them.

But again, if you can figure out how to make it work for them financially, figure out how you can derisk and incentivize, and kind of take more of a group approach where you say: “hey, you should come in because these five others are coming in.” It can be much better because the relationships can be developed deeper; they’re not going to be so fickle and want to change course there; the management is less likely to turnover. Those can be very rewarding.

There are risks both ways, and I think it’s very dependent on the market and the product you have on which approach is the better one to take.

What are your thoughts on XI?

I think the mentor approach at XI is an excellent one. Programming is great. I’ve learned some wonderful things in the programming where a guest speaker comes in, and they’ve got an hour to talk about their time, and I’ll just pick up a nugget from one of those sessions — pretty much every time — and figure out how to apply it.

But it’s really the mentorship where someone can spend the time to get to know you, your market, your company, your product, a lot of your challenges, and dynamics, and actually then start to offer advice.

I feel that general advice is rarely useful, but when someone can get specific to understand you, then start to bring an outside perspective to challenge some of the things you’ve done and thinking you have — it’s so great

Not to mention once you start to build those relationships with the leadership at XI, with the mentors, with the other companies, we’ve had business opportunities open up that way. We have found employees that way.

Want to hear more? Listen to “The People Behind Innovation” on Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify streaming services, or on Anchor with no account needed to stream.